Maple syrup runs through Keith Schiebel’s veins.

Stephen D. Cannerelli / The Post-StandardKeith Schiebel FFA advisor and agriculture teacher in the Vernon-Verona-Sherrill Central School District, helps Neil Collins, a junior and the Vice President of Community Development for the VVS Future Farmers of America, check their maple syrup at the VVS High School Saphouse. Schiebel was named one of the six agriculture teachers in the United States and the top one in his region covering from Maine to West Virginia.

Name:Keith Schiebel

Age: 48

Education: Associates’ degree from State University College at Cobleskill; bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Cornell University.

Profession: Agricultural teacher since 1985 at Vernon-Verona-Sherrill High School.

Home: Day Road, Vernon

Family: Wife, Paulette; daughter, Nikki, a freshman at State University College at Plattsburgh, and Tracee and Deanna, students at Vernon-Verona-Sherrill High School.

Ag education connections: Schiebel is president of the New York State Agricultural Teachers Association and chairman of the Governing Board of the New York State FFA Organization. His daughter, Tracee, is vice president of the state FFA student organization. His brother, Jim, is president of the New York State Retired Agricultural Teachers Association.

Schiebel and his agricultural students have made Vernon-Verona-Sherrill High School a maple mecca, attracting crowds from across the Northeast United States each year to enjoy and learn about the sweet nectar of the maple tree.

The National Association of Agricultural Educators named Schiebel as one of six outstanding agricultural educational teachers in the country in March, just two months after the New York State Agricultural Society designated the VVS FFA Organization (formerly known as Future Farmers of America) as New York’s top chapter.

“I came here in 1985 and saw in the sugar bush (the maple tree stand near the school) as a resource I could use to teach,” Schiebel said.

He has built an agricultural curriculum centered on maple products that today boasts 176 students.

His big brother, Jim, a retired ag teacher from Western New York was in town “for the pancakes” on Maple Sunday, March 27. “It’s a fantastic program,” he said.

“We’re really proud of him,” echoed V-V-S school district superintendent Norman Reed, as he inhaled the sweet steam from a maple syrup extractor in the school’s sugar house behind the high school.

The V-V-S sugar house produced 27 gallons of syrup in 1992, its first year.

This year, Schiebel hopes to pump out “an all-time high of over 700 gallons for the season,” using sap from the school’s 3,600 taps and from local producers like Brian Schieferstine, a former V-V-S ag student. The profits from selling the syrup are pumped back into the V-V-S agriculture program. Schiebel said within two years he hopes to use the money “to build a commercial food science lab to teach production of maple cream and maple sugar.”

On Maple Sunday, Schieferstine was driving a tractor hauling a tram full of visitors to see the maple tree taps in the V-V-S sugar bush. He runs about 1,500 taps himself in Vernon Center, thanks to the start he got at V-V-S. He said Schiebel’s popular maple-based program “is what V-V-S in known for today.”

Next year, Schiebel could pull the tourist trams with the new Toyota Tundra pickup truck that Toyota Motor Sales Inc. awarded the six outstanding agriculture teachers. They received two-year leases on the trucks.

Schiebel said the maple program teaches students every aspect of agriculture, from harvesting raw material to production to marketing to agricultural economy.

And it reaches far beyond the school walls.

“We also host the biggest conference in the United States dedicated to maple products,” Schiebel said. “Even Vermont and New Hampshire (New York’s biggest competitors in the maple business) send people here to learn (state-of-the-art production techniques).”

Schiebel and the FFA members eagerly share their love of things maple. The week before Maple Sunday, they served pancakes and maple syrup to the New York State Assembly Agricultural Committee on the eighth floor of the Legislative Office Building in Albany.

This week, they are taking the maple exhibit trailer they built to schools in New York City, and on April 17 they will travel to Quebec, Canada, to visit syrup producers and manufacturers of syrup processing equipment.

“Our next goal is to form a maple cooperative for area producers with the school as a hub to process the syrup,” Schiebel said. “We’ve encouraged a lot of kids, and we want to encourage local enterprise.”